Island Of Knowledge, Part I
MARCELO GLEISER: Last week, we saw how the Greeks started to think about nature in adifferent way. Instead of using myths to explain natural phenomena, they started to ask questions
about nature and tried to answer those questions with rational arguments.
We also saw how
Plato's Allegory of the Cave was the first serious reflection on the nature of reality.
From Greece, we went to the Renaissance where the first pioneers of modern science developed
a completely new way of thinking about the cosmos. Modern
science was born from the
combination of two main ideas: The use of tools to measure and observe natural phenomena with
increasing precision and the use of mathematics to search for patterns in the data that reveal what
scientists call the "laws of nature
." We saw that, after thousands of years of an Earth
-
centered cosmos, Copernicus put the sun at the center and how Galileo, Kepler, and Newton worked to
confirm this new cosmic worldview that would profoundly changed the way we picture the
cosmos and our p
lace in it. This week, we will continue our exploration of the universe
--telling
the story of how Newton's law of gravity changed into Einstein's view of the universe based on
his famous theory of relativity. We will explore modern ideas of cosmology, ofthe Big Bang,and even recent speculations that our universe is not all there is
--
being, instead, part of a
multiverse, possibly infinite in space and eternal in duration.
